From a cold DM to AWS Community Day Surat: a full-circle journey
How a cold DM in January 2025 turned into restarting AWS User Group Surat - and, a year later, the city's first AWS Community Day with our own golden sponsor booth.
The journey
In January 2025, I sent a cold DM to Omshree Butani asking for a 15-minute conversation about the AWS community. On October 3, 2026, I was at Surat's first AWS Community Day, running the Sarvaswa AI Labs golden sponsor booth.
Between those two moments were certifications, monthly meetups, a trip to Vadodara, new working relationships and a simple ask: could we bring this community experience to Surat?
It started with a conversation
I was leading AWS partnerships at my previous company when I first came across AWS User Groups. Around that time, I saw a LinkedIn post by Omshree Butani. I sent her a connection request and a cold DM, asking if she could spare 15 minutes for a Google Meet.
She said yes. That conversation gave me my first real understanding of the AWS community and its user groups. AWS User Group Surat was not very active then, but I kept following what was happening in the wider community.
I earned certifications, helped move the company I worked with to the AWS Advanced Tier, and hosted an event with IIM Ahmedabad Ventures and AWS in Ahmedabad.
The ask at ACD Vadodara 2025
When AWS Community Day Vadodara was announced, I decided to attend and support it as a community patron. There, I met Ridhima Kapoor from AWS Developer Relations, Dhaval Nagar and Nirmal Chhodvadiya from the Surat user group.
My ask was simple. There were people like me in Surat who wanted to be part of a community like this. Could we restart the meetups in Surat and have our own Community Day the following year?
After we returned, Nirmal Bhai hosted a Surat user group meetup that same month, the first monthly meetup after a gap of a couple of years. We kept organizing an event each month.
One meetup at a time
I co-hosted one of those events alongside Nirmal Bhai, with Chirag Oswal, Vishal Alhat and Shaguna Awasthi from AWS as speakers. Chirag has since moved to OpenAI.
I was also invited to MNNIT Allahabad's AWS Student Community Day as a guest speaker, where I gave a session on AI and the AWS cloud.
At one of the Surat user group events, I met Mitul Sarvaiya, founder of Sarvaswa AI Labs. We kept meeting at the monthly events. Over time, our vision aligned, and we decided to work together.
Back in Surat, with our own booth
This year, we hosted AWS Community Day Surat 2026. Sarvaswa AI Labs supported the event as a Golden Sponsor, and I was there at our golden sponsor booth.
Last year, I had been a community patron in Vadodara, asking about the possibility of a Community Day in Surat. This year, I was at our golden sponsor booth, alongside a team I had come to know through the same community. That was a full-circle moment, and a humbling one.
I also met Nikunj Sir, my college professor. Nirmal Bhai and I share that connection with him. Meeting him at AWS Community Day Surat, a few years after graduation, made the day even more personal.
The speakers and sessions
The event was very well organized, with technical sessions and business guidance throughout the day. Thank you to all the speakers for the work they put into their sessions.
- Ridhima Kapoor: The AI Builder Journey: Learn. Build. Share. Repeat.
- Udit Parikh: Three Layers of Defence: Securing AI Agents on AWS.
- Shubham Purwar: Breaking Down Data Silos: Interoperability with Iceberg.
- Aman Gupta: Building Real-Time Voice Applications with Amazon Nova 2 Sonic.
- Dhaval Nagar: AWS Serverless Beyond Lambda: How Production Systems Fit Together.
- Krutarth Rindani and Ashish Gajjar: Your Next DevOps Engineer Is an AI Agent: Autonomous EKS Troubleshooting.
- Vishal Kotecha: Lightning Talk.
Thank you also to Nirmal Chhodvadiya and Dhaval Nagar for the welcome and opening ceremony, and to Nirmal Chhodvadiya and Rahul Ladumor for the closing remarks and community recognition.
Thank you to the people who made it happen
Omshree Butani, thank you for saying yes to that first conversation. Dhaval and Nirmal Bhai, thank you for helping bring the community back together in Surat and for everything that followed.
Thank you to all the sponsors: Yanolja Cloud Solution, devx labs, APPGAMBIT, Sarvaswa AI Labs, CirOps, Vartalaap, Narola Infotech and Red & White.
And thank you to every core-team member, volunteer, speaker, community partner and attendee who helped make this experience possible. I am grateful to each of you.
For me, this journey started with wanting to understand the AWS community. Along the way, it became a place to contribute, meet people and build working relationships.
Surat's first AWS Community Day brought that journey together. ❤️🚀
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